Fort Collins City Councilman Wade Troxell is concerned that CSU is trying to build a new stadium without a plan to integrate it into the surrounding community, he said Thursday.

There hasn't been the kind of coordination with the city or enough of the broader discussion of what role a new stadium will have in making Colorado State University better, Troxell said while discussing a recent visit to Southern Methodist University to review the process it went through in building its on-campus stadium 14 years ago in Dallas.

"I've described this as 'fire, aim, ready,' in terms of how it's been presented, and that's really sad," Troxell said.

Troxell, a former CSU football player and an associate dean in engineering at the university, and Diane Jones, a senior policy and project manager for the city of Fort Collins, visited SMU last month to learn how the surrounding neighborhoods were impacted by the construction of Gerald J. Ford Stadium. The 32,000-seat facility opened in 2000, bringing the school's football games back to the Dallas-area campus for the first time in 52 years.

"The on-campus stadium seems to be a positive for the university and the communities," they wrote in the summary of a 15-page report they prepared and presented earlier this week to the Community Design Development Advisory Committee for a proposed $254 million, 36,000-seat stadium at CSU.

Property values in the surrounding neighborhoods have increased, Jones said, and officials in University Park, Highland Park and Dallas County continue to work together to address parking and traffic concerns. The SMU stadium is located along a two-lane road just two blocks away from a major expressway.

Average attendance for SMU's six home games in 2013 was 18,724.

As a private university, SMU was required to follow local building and design standards and codes, and that helped mitigate many other concerns, Troxell and Jones said. CSU has no such restrictions under Colorado law, which gives the same home-rule rights to public universities that cities enjoy.

Still, Troxell said, it's important for CSU and the city to work together on projects like this that will have such a significant impact on both. He estimates the stadium will require $30 million to $50 million worth of infrastructure, including utility hookups, stormwater and sewer improvements and street and sidewalk projects, based on what similar-sized stadiums built in recent years have required.

SMU sunk the stadium 24 feet below ground level to help the building itself fit in better with the "Collegiate-Georgian style" of other buildings on campus and the surrounding neighborhoods. The school also was required to put up a wall around the stadium site during construction to reduce noise. And ordinances were written that limited the types of events that stadium could host and its signage, prohibiting "amplified" musical performances and lighted displays on the back of the main scoreboard. The lighting and sound systems have been upgraded in the past few years to the kind of "directed" systems that are called for in CSU's stadium plans, reducing spillage into the surrounding area.

CSU officials have said the proposed stadium, which will rise 11 to 12 stories high and contain 85,000-square feet of academic space, meets all criteria of the university's Master Plan, including the protection of the "view shed" of the foothills to the west from the Oval and preservation of the "great green" area of intramural and athletic fields south of Moby Arena and the student recreation center. Plans include a walkway to the stadium's north entrance off Meridian Avenue, which is being turned into a pedestrian and bicycle corridor through the heart of campus.

The water table is too high to sink the CSU stadium more than 10 to 12 feet below ground, architect Algen Williams of Populous told the development advisory committee Monday.

The SMU stadium was part of a major upgrade that included the building of the George W. Bush Presidential Center a block away and a museum just west of the stadium. It gave the school of 12,000 students a new gateway to campus for visitors arriving off the North Central Expressway, much as CSU first proposed creating off Prospect Road more than 10 years ago.

There's a lot CSU and the city can learn from SMU's experience, Troxell and Jones said.

"From my perspective, to have a great university, you need to have a great community, and vice versa," Troxell said. "It can't be done in a vacuum or in isolation. I would like to see more engagement as to what that is, and where are we lifting the university together and where are we lifting the community together."